Tropical Depression Halola is getting stronger. NASA data pinpointed the area of strongest sustained winds on July 19 and the extent of those winds expanded on July 20 as Halola became a tropical storm again. NASA also gathered ...

A University of Exeter scientist is set to send thousands of microscopic worms on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in an experiment aimed at increasing our understanding of what triggers the body to build ...

While life is everywhere on Earth, there is much debate about how it began. Some believe it originated naturally from the chemistry found on our planet as it evolved. Others hypothesize that life—or at least the building ...

Observations of a rare astronomical phenomenon, called a luminous red nova, suggest that this bright outburst was caused by a red giant colliding with another star. Astronomers used the Liverpool Telescope to track the outburst ...

Combining 26-year old data with supercomputer simulations, a team of scientists at Imperial College London have modelled Neptune's magnetic field in detail for the first time. The researchers find that the furthest planet ...

A ring of dust 200 light years across and a loop covering a third of the sky: two of the results in a new map from the Planck satellite. Dr Mike Peel and Dr Paddy Leahy of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JCBA) presented ...

The Clean Space One Project has passed a milestone. The space cleanup satellite will deploy a conical net to capture the small SwissCube satellite before destroying it in the atmosphere. It's one of the solutions being tested ...

Space

Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. In mathematics spaces with different numbers of dimensions and with different underlying structures can be examined. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the universe although disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.

Many of the philosophical questions arose in the 17th century, during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute - in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there were any matter in the space. Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant described space and time as elements of a systematic framework which humans use to structure their experience.

In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine non-Euclidean geometries, in which space can be said to be curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space. Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean space provides a better model for explaining the existing laws of mechanics and optics.